billboard BREAKDOWN - hot 100 - may 18, 2024
So I said last week that the extended time between events and the Hot 100 being released can be a boon when it comes to more comprehensive analysis, but there’s another side to it: the feeling that I’m just late to the party, that everyone has already seen as many reactions and critique and analysis as they can stomach and thus you’re beating on a dead horse, or you don’t have anything new to offer. Of course, when one of the songs to come out of that moment turns into something close to a cultural phenomenon and you’re still reckoning with the implications of that…
Yeah, let’s not waste time, the top 10, and a new #1 that cleared the competition by a mile: ‘Not Like Us’ by Kendrick Lamar. Let’s make this clear, I’ll have a lot more to say with this song later on, and some of it y’all won’t like it, but it rapidly became clear that with the sales, streaming and YouTube it was running up - before even an official video - it was bulldozing any competition in its way, and given it’s been shipped to radio, it’s only a matter of time before it locks up the top spot! God only knows when that happens - especially with that Morgan Wallen / Post Malone collab coming - but it was enough to clear ‘Million Dollar Baby’ by Tommy Richman at #2, which just couldn’t keep in pace across the board. And it’s wild, for a bit it was a two-horse race between that and ‘euphoria’ by Kendrick Lamar at #3, which leapt into the top ten with a bit less on sales but trailing right behind on streams… but ‘Not Like Us’ crushed them both, go figure. This leaves ‘Fortnight’ by Taylor Swift and Post Malone almost feeling like an afterthought at #4 - yeah, it’s picked up a lot of radio pretty quickly, but it doesn’t have a ton of forward momentum and the streaming fell off sharply; the more I think about it, the more it feels like a good song but not a strong single, it’ll be telling to see what gets pushed next. And yet it was enough to hold over 'A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ by Shaboozey at #5, where it’s winning on sales, but just can’t compete at the same volume on streaming and radio is way too sluggish to get onboard yet - although it feels like they should, if pushed right this’ll could do a lot for radio this summer. Then we have ‘Like That’ by Future, Metro Boomin, and Kendrick Lamar up to #6 - I said last week that it would be telling if this song picked up traction amidst the other diss tracks, and it speaks to both industry and cultural penetration that the streaming saw gains and radio is on the upswing; one of the areas this beef was won was on culture, that cannot be ignored, and if you need any more proof, it beat out our other new debut: ‘Family Matters’ by Drake at #7. It got a ton of streams and it sold decently well… just not enough. This leaves three songs with tangible radio traction stranded outside, and it’s hard for me to complain about any of it: at #8 ‘Espressso’ by Sabrina Carpenter, where she actually saw streaming losses amidst radio momentum, at #9 ‘Beautiful Things’ by Benson Boone which hit a radio peak and is losing streams as well, and ‘Lose Control’ by Teddy Swims at #10, which is doing a credible job holding the top radio spot… which is the majority of what it has, oh well.
This naturally takes us to our losers and dropouts, of which the only one of notice in the latter category is ‘La Diabla’ by Xavi actually having clinched a year-end list spot - of his two songs that broke through, it’s the better one, I’m not going to complain. As for our losers… well, ‘Texas Hold Em’ is losing momentum at 36 having already cliched its spot, and ‘Adivino’ by Myke Towers and Bad Bunny slid off the debut to 91, but as expected the rest is Taylor Swift with the next wave of her album bomb losses. So, from the top: ‘Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me’ at 26, ‘So Long, London’ at 28, ‘But Daddy I Love Him’ at 30, ‘My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys’ at 31, ‘Florida!!!’ featuring Florence + The Machine at 33, ‘Guilty As Sin?’ at 35, ‘The Tortured Poets Department’ at 38, ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’ at 51, ‘loml’ by 53, ‘Fresh Out The Slammer’ at 54, ‘The Alchemy’ at 56, ‘imgonnagetyouback’ at 62, ‘I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)’ at 63, ‘So High School’ at 65, ‘The Black Dog’ at 67, ‘Clara Bow’ at 70, ‘The Prophecy’ at 77, ‘How Did It End?’ at 81, ‘thanK you aIMee’ at 88, ‘The Albatross’ at 89, ‘I Hate It Here’ at 94, and ‘Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus’ at 100. You know, for as many people who online seem to openly despise this album, it’s having more chart longevity than I think anyone could have expected - even with as huge as she is, this many songs lasting post-album bomb is kind of insane!
What it means is that we have a very limited number of returns and gains, the most jarring in the former group being ‘Cowgirls’ by Morgan Wallen and ERNEST at 42… because guess what just got shipped to Nashville radio, fan-fucking-tastic! The slightly better story comes with the return of ‘Training Season’ by Dua Lipa to 79 thanks to her album impact… unfortunately flipping over to gains it saw ‘Illusion’ jump to 50 and I’m starting to be convinced that’s her worst song to date. The rest of our gains are a mixed bag: off the continued gains ‘Get It Sexyy’ by Sexyy Red continued to 21, off the returns ‘Dirt Cheap’ by Cody Johnson went to 83, ‘We Ride’ by Bryan Martin went to 82, and ‘Bandit’ by Don Toliver went to 72, and the last two have had some elasticity to fluctuate but stick roughly to position: ‘Tucson Too Late’ by Jordan Davis at 71, and ‘Get In With Me’ by Bossman Dlow at 61 - to follow up from last week, given that UMG and TikTok struck a deal, I’ll be focusing a lot less on that, but it is worth noting as a whole subsection of the music industry gets to push from that platform again. That may have been fortuitous timing to factor into the beef given how both Kendrick and Drake have deals, distribution or otherwise, that roll up under UMG…
But we’re not quite there yet. We have a few other new arrivals before we get into the mess proper…
99. ‘Take Her Home’ by Kenny Chesney - here’s something you might not know: Kenny Chesney has not released a new album since 2020’s Here And Now, and while it would be very funny to highlight that the title track was so tonedeaf at the time of its release during lockdown that it stalled out his career… that’s not quite true, he had two other minor hits following it, he had a great collab with Kelsea Ballerini in 2021, a few other songs that didn’t really go anywhere in 2022, and now he’s back with this single which dropped November of last year and has only hit the Hot 100 now. And… I’m honestly struck by blandly incompetent it is, not that it’s outright bad but that it feels so underwhelming and questionably assembled. Chesney sounds checked out, the trap skitter and drum machine is there behind the broader guitars but mostly buried - you can probably thank the HARDY cowrite for that - and the story about a young love hookup and later having kids feels blunted by a lot of wonky lyrical choices. The TouchTunes reference to deep-cut Cheap Trick almost feels like a brand placement until we get the Patron line, but I’m more bewildered by how the first implies his girl is singing along with the music, but the following lines has him go to someone who doesn’t have a boyfriend… so is he just openly cheating? And there’s just turns of phrase that feels awkward, like ‘stuffed truck’ and ‘raised-hell heart’ and describing a baby like a ‘seven pound five ounce scene in a car-seat creeping down the interstate’… how was this not proof-read, this is a mess! Except then you realize that the song itself is dull as dishwater and I guarantee I will have forgotten it in record time, next!
95. ‘whatsapp (wassam)’ by Gunna - I didn’t have many kind things to say about Gunna’s newest bloated project where the album bomb is probably coming next week - joy - but this probably is my favourite song from it, with the production doing the majority of the heavy lifting with that flute cascading around the grander arrangement as the bass wells around the sharper trap percussion; the groove from Turbo and EVRGRN is terrific, let’s get a remix with a more interesting rapper than Gunna! And his monotone is probably the worst part of the song, but he doesn’t have as many bad lines here: I didn’t know you could do wire transfers through Whatsapp, I find it distinctly hilarious that Gunna wants to spank one of his haters, and the line ‘allergic to broke, I got allergies’ is pretty stupid, but the rest of the shallow brand name flexing as he tries to revitalize his career - so much so that a girl wants to inherit him, okay - is flimsy but passable. Again, how much anyone cares about what Gunna actually says is up to date, the production is really the star of the show here. In other words, I think this is good… but again, that album bomb possibly coming will not be fun to handle.
86. ‘Si No Quieres No’ by Luis R Conriquez & Neton Vega - I’ve purposely avoided calling the regional Mexican explosion of the past few years a ‘trend’ - I was very tempted, it seemed too idiosyncratic to last that long, but what I expect will happen is similar to other scenes crossing over, in that the biggest names becomes sustainable hitmakers and the rest see sporadic crossover. With that, here are two acts I’ve never talked about before, Luis R. Conriquez having been quite active in the corridos scene with four albums already, and Neton Vega… less so, his biggest credit is cowriting ‘Rubicon’ with Peso Pluma. And… well, Conriquez is more guttural and visceral with a lot of reverb stacked up around his voice to make him sound more imposing, Vega is a cleaner balladeer, and honestly doesn’t really match the darker energy of the song where we get some actual bass to match the painfully brittle acoustics and staccato horns, even if I think the guitarwork is a lot more complex than I expected! When translated… this is cartel-level gangster operations, with some very dark implications, and while the activities currently swirling around the Mexican elections has me give a lot of pause to all this - Conriquez is literally signed to a label ‘Kartel Music’ - I can take this as more posturing than anything else. Honestly, this sound still isn’t really for me, but in this lane I liked this more than I thought I would… it’s worth a shot.
37. ‘Miles On It’ by Marshmello & Kane Brown - The infuriating thing with Kane Brown isn’t that he’s not talented, but seems to make a lot of rash or stupid decisions. He’s cut good songs that I like, but he’s nowhere close to consistent and then he’ll decide to do something asinine like work with Marshmello years after people stopped caring about him! Now I’ll say this, it’s better than ‘One Thing Right’ - not hard - but the slushy synth rammed behind the acoustic guitars, synthetic multi-tracking, and weirdly weak percussion, all forced through way too much compression, leads to a song that has no tangible impact, and for otherwise shallow EDM about breaking in a new truck with your girl - in more ways than one, that second verse gets disgusting - you need at least some of that! But the bigger problem might be Kane Brown - he’s trying to come off as laid back and cool and it’s just not working when there’s no subtlety to speak of, it’s just so checked out and hollow. Yeah, the tempo is fast enough that I can see myself tolerating this in the right environment, but that’s not an indictment of quality, especially when you hear that this has been shipped to Nashville radio, proving that once again Music Row has no standards for what they consider country beyond who is making it and if that person got their cosign. It’s not getting mine.
12. ‘Meet The Grahams’ by Kendrick Lamar - and now to the meaty part of this episode and as I said with ‘euphoria’ last week, there needs to be some care in discussing rap beef with the acknowledgement that this has already hit the streets and even if things have settled a bit, the sort of allegations that Kendrick Lamar made public on this song are not to be handled lightly. What I appreciate is that at least here, he recognizes that, and thus we see one of the most bleak and horrifying diss tracks ever released, with the Alchemist handling production with the eerie keys and lumbering groove and gospel howls echoing in the distance; it’s been described as the soundtrack of a horror movie, but I think it should be clarified that it’s the sort of stalking, psychological nightmare fuel that ends with ‘he then turned the gun on himself’. Four verses, the first to Drake’s son Adonis, the second to his parents, the third to a previously unknown daughter, the last to Drake himself, where it feels like ripping away any veneer around Drake to see the wretched man beneath it, the true picture of the man consumed by his vices. And while we could go beat-by-beat through everything Kendrick says and alleges to shock the audience, the truly disquieting part is that if you’ve followed Drake in-depth, especially in Toronto, none of it is that surprising. The drug abuse, solicitation, and gambling is known, it would contribute to Kendrick highlighting how bad with money Drake is and the sketchy ways he’s moved in response, and for the underage allegations… folks knew about the Embassy parties for years to say nothing of Baka’s case, and Drake himself used Tupac’s voice on ‘Taylor Made’ to goad Kendrick into mentioning it, perhaps the worst possible attempt to play the 8 Mile tactic because with so many allegations swirling for years, it winds up feeling more true, and the later denials on ‘The Heart Pt. 6’ did not save him! And for those who expected Kendrick to go to the police… to paraphase Lil Bill who did an excellent video on this specifically, when you have Drake bragging about his relationships with a compromised Toronto PD and politicians, to say nothing of the mob ties of which I will not elaborate, do you honestly think they’d stop him? Then comes the daughter allegation… and the frustrating thing here is that I’ve found news articles tied to a Miami bartender from 2015 with a possible paternity test where the dates line up, independent of Drake obviously lying and saying he fed Kendrick the information - if Drake had really found that mole in OVO, he wouldn’t have made so many grievous tactical missteps in this beef - but for me the ‘tea’ was never going to be the deciding factor of this beef, with the best part of that verse being the sheer venom in which Kendrick delivers the final line about ‘more life’, good god. But the masterclass is the final verse, where Kendrick admits it did not have to go personal, it could have just been verbal sparring… but Drake went there in the same stupid mistake he made with Pusha T, and where any remaining shred of cultural cache burns away as Kendrick stacks his vocals and highlights everything Drake has lied about to fuel his insecurity to make art that nobody truly ‘believed in’, to the final line that Drake’s biggest enemy is himself. And when you couple it with perfect timing to stifle any conversation about ‘Family Matters’… look, I get why this charted lower, it’s honestly a difficult song to revisit for how ugly it is, I’m a little stunned it charted at all… but it worked with a heinous efficiency, where the echo of Pusha T’s line ‘if we all go to hell, it will be worth it’ as the implication that Push would have taken it here too. To me, this would have finished the job… but before we get to what did, we have what could have worked…
7. ‘Family Matters’ by Drake - Let me make this clear as someone who is no fan of Drake and even less so after how he’s behaved in recent years: the potential is here for this to work. I’m of the opinion that Drake is a rapper who at his best can compete with Kendrick, which is why for chunks of this beef I’ve had this battle as closer than many do. And let’s make this clear: there are real shots that Drake takes here that land even before we get to any allegations. For example, Drake could have pushed on the activist angle when it comes to Kendrick’s material, just how much he’s an entertainer for the masses like Drake is, Noname threw those shots at Kendrick and there’s validity there, as are the shots to Kendrick’s integrity - he might have been savvy breaking his ego across several albums, but if Drake wanted to twist the knife, he could go in deeper and drill into questions of respectability and playing to white audiences at TDE and Interscope’s behest to win Grammys and a Pulitzer, especially targeting the messy hypocrisies that deeper thinkers have observed about Kendrick. It would have gotten political - more than Drake has ever been - but I’ve been saying for weeks there are lines of attack on Kendrick and Drake started down that path… but he clearly thought his ‘nuke’ was implying Kendrick’s kids are really those of his business partner Dave Free, and that Kendrick laid hands on Whitney, his wife, because that blows apart Kendrick’s ‘integrity’ defense and he has a much higher pedestal from which to fall. And honestly, there’s a chance that the last case is true - there’s a lot of murky hearsay I’ve found in my research, it’s about as credible as Drake having a daughter in terms of the mid-2010s sources I’ve found, and Drake knows that it just has to be plausible to work, if Kendrick doesn’t address it at a later point on record, it’ll look a way to me especially given how honest he’s been on his albums… and truth be told, how women have been framed in these battles has been gross from both angles. But again, the allegations were never going to be what decided any beef for me, and that’s the first mistake that Drake took from losing to ‘The Story Of Adidon’ - it was never just ‘you are hiding a child’, it was the larger dissection and critique of Drake’s character as a man, but if you’re convinced you have to win the tabloid internet, I understand the tactic. Would that have been the only mistake here, because instead of just focusing on Kendrick, over a third of the song is targeting everyone else Drake has issues with, with passing shots at Metro Boomin, Rick Ross, A$AP Rocky - you could have just ignored him, Drake, it only makes you look still not over Rihanna with this - and the most at The Weeknd. Now from one angle, this makes sense - he’s the closest to home, their beef goes back years, and The Weeknd is not a rapper and should be dismissed quickly - but it speaks to another big mistake in my books beyond the tacky lines about The Weeknd’s music playing more in gay clubs tied to some CashXO allegations: if you have street shit in your own city that you haven’t squashed for years where the shootings are already going down, you leave yourself open at a critical angle, you should have wrapped this up after ‘War’ years ago! And that’s the infuriating thing about ‘Family Matters’ as a whole: it’s not focused on your main target when you should have ignored everyone else, it’s leaning too hard on salacious details that Drake feels he has to explain multiple times, and while I like the beat switches from the ominous trap to the oily drill to the creeping strings on the final section, it’s aiming for this cinematic grandeur including that video that I think is revealing of arrogance and laziness to not come as prepared as Kendrick was, assuming that this was enough. Or hell, at least not leave so many obvious angles in referencing West Coast MCs and gangstas who proved they would back Kendrick, or holding Pharrell’s jewelry which gives Kendrick the layup of an attack, or how The Weeknd would travel to Atlanta which Kendrick would directly flip as well, or the clumsy as hell attempt to tack on Michael Jackson’s uglier side to Kendrick and it doesn’t stick! So while I can agree that this is some of Drake’s strongest rapping in a while and he lands body blows… in hindsight it’s more revealing than good. And that takes us to…
1. ‘Not Like Us’ by Kendrick Lamar - There’s a big difference between acknowledging when something ‘works’ versus whether you like it or not, and ‘Not Like Us’ by Kendrick Lamar might as well be the poster child of that, because while it absolutely won the beef in Kendrick’s favour… I don’t care for this song at all. And for me to say that despite everything that Kendrick lands is relevant, so let’s focus on the good first: I like the wit and sense of humour once again, and even the jokes in questionable taste are proving to ring off, where you find new quotables every day: 'beat your ass and hide the bible if god watchin’, the a-minor line, the bird references, Kendrick’s exasperation at Drake assuming the audience isn’t smart, flipping back how Drake is as much of a pop star hiding behind IG captions, and then leaning on very direct Compton cultural references alongside the weird mess in OVO. And the third verse is fucking great: running down the history of Atlanta to directly tie what Drake has appropriated from the city, where Kendrick could not only trigger the anger from Toronto natives that ‘God’s Plan’ wasn’t filmed up here, but also reference the jewelry from Pharrell and make the ‘colonizer’ line actually land! And while I don’t love this production from DJ Mustard - I prefer his more groove-driven beats, whereas the bass rumble, brittle hi hats and snap against the creaking strings and wheezy sample - the simplified format and structure is proof that Kendrick could have easily made West Coast club bangers for years that could have rolled Drake off the charts, and he chose to do more. It has me looking at this track like a victory lap, where Drake trying to get defensive badly on ‘The Heart Pt. 6’ doesn’t even register… but there’s a weird taste to this celebration I just can’t shake, and I think some of it is Kendrick’s performance just coming off a little inert and flat to me compared to the dramatic intensity he shows at his best. Then there’s the pedo angle that Kendrick really wants to stick with so many quotable lines - and the John Stockton one was clever - and when you compare it to the gravity presented with ‘Meet The Grahams’, which I thought was enough to end it, it comes across as weirdly slight to dumb it down for the dance bop, where I’m reminded that one of Kendrick’s other big influences is Eminem, and this was a dark joke even he couldn’t land. But in a way that makes a certain degree of sense, because Em always made a point to show respect to hip-hop culture, and this fitting within that canon works. But I have the ugly feeling this is a few bullets and court cases away from aging really badly, like a lot of those old Eminem ‘staples’ have, which is the underlying reality of going to this place in rap beef where for the public at large it’s just ‘entertainment’; I know Kendrick knows that, and I also know he’s not above going here, and that he wouldn’t have if Drake hadn’t opened pandora’s box… but this being the most credible ‘final word’ feels like a choice, and it’s my least favourite of the disses Kendrick dropped; really wish he could have gotten that Al Green sample cleared for ‘6:16 In LA’!
Anyway, that’s a lot but that’s our week, and best/worst fall out pretty straightforward: Best is ‘Meet The Grahams’ by Kendrick Lamar, even if it’s likely to be a song I rarely revisit, worst is ‘Miles On It’ by Marshmello and Kane Brown, shocker. Next week… well, that Post Malone / Morgan Wallen collab is going to be a thing, we’ll see if Gunna gets the album bomb…